The Pyrocene Has Come to Stay in Chile and on the Planet
By Andres Kogan Valderrama
HAVANA TIMES – The tragedy we are facing in Chile as a result of the huge fires in the Valparaíso Region, has left more than 100 dead, 300 missing, over 3000 houses burned, many pets lost, and thousands of hectares scorched. It has been devastating for the country, with the Boric government declaring a state of emergency and national mourning.
Hence, everything has been focused on extinguishing the fires and providing the corresponding assistance to all affected families, who are going through a real hell, especially in cities like Viña del Mar, Quilpue, Villa Alemana, and Limache, where authorities, firefighters, and various civil society organizations are doing everything they can in the face of these dramatic circumstances.
However, this catastrophe has also been accompanied by a poor public debate in traditional media and on social networks, regarding the causes of these fires. Instead, focusing on the intentionality of certain groups in their spread, rather than the historical structural causes and the lack of socio-environmental policies that would allow systemic responses to all this.
Hence, there has been talk that the fires have been caused by political groups, vandals, and even by a real estate cartel, which would be using terror as a means to generate institutional destabilization and economic gain from the tragedy we are facing. They forget that it is within a context of climate crisis and increasing global temperatures, not giving it that fact the weight it should have.
I raise this issue because, without denying the intentionality of many fires, as well as the necessary investigation by the justice system of those responsible, I feel that as a society we are not fully grasping the historical relationship we have had as human beings with fire and with a completely unsustainable hegemonic way of life regarding the care of life on the planet, which is the real cause of what is happening to us in Chile and around the world ultimately.
This is what various researchers have pointed out, such as Stephen J. Pyne, who has said that our relationship with fire, from its discovery and use 1 million years ago, then through its dominance since the Neolithic revolution and the emergence of the first great civilizations, and finally with its total conquest with the arrival of Western, capitalist, and industrial modernity, laid the foundations for a way of relating to our environment that got out of hand.
In other words, it is what Pyne calls the Pyrocene, which, like the notion of the Anthropocene, shows how our evolution as human beings has brought about an increasingly greater differentiation with our environment. Only that in the case of fire, while it brought enormous developments to our lives (food, heating), it has also brought with it its use for battles, wars, and massacres among human beings and a conquest of nature, reaching its peak with the burning of fossil fuels and the unrestrained expansion of capitalism.
Consequently, what is behind all these fires and environmental crises is a historical separation between culture and nature, which may have brought about a huge technological leap, but at the cost of death and destruction of communities and entire territories, in the name of progress, revolution, or development, to the detriment of other much more harmonious ways of living with ecosystems and the reproduction of life on Earth.
It seems to me that once again we are falling into the same mistake as with the pandemic, focusing on how to fight it and even spreading conspiracy theories about who supposedly created covid-19, instead of seeing it also as a historical process, heir to the separation of culture and nature, and as a response to a capitalist world system, which with the delirious idea of unlimited economic growth, is leading us to a civilizational collapse.
Having said all that, and returning to what is happening in Chile at this moment with the fires, I hope that the discussion will not be solely centered on mere security issues and both from the left and the right we open ourselves to see it from a broad and holistic perspective, understanding that what is happening is connected to how poorly we have been relating to territories and the planet for a long time, without realizing it.
Therefore, all views and measures that propose criticisms of a prevailing extractive forestry, real estate, and consumerist model are welcome. Likewise, alternatives focused on providing sustainable and caring responses to what we have called the environment, through reforestation policies, soil restoration, land planning, and urgent socio-environmental education that generates a profound change in how we relate to life.